Blogs

VirtualWisdom5 and the industry’s first real-time performance monitoring solution for NAS

By Tim Van Ash, Senior Vice President of Products

Until now, vendor-independent performance monitoring for network attached storage (NAS) workloads has been hard to come by. IT teams tasked with ensuring the performance of business-critical NAS apps have had two choices for problem-solving. They could use complicated packet capture (PCAP) tools to send information to vendor support teams and spend days working with their vendors to diagnose problems – with unknown resolution times. Alternatively, teams could buy more NAS nodes, making their vendors happy, but wasting their precious budgets. Our customers, who know what our SAN performance monitoring solutions can do, knew they wanted a better way, and they asked us to help.

Our answer is today’s announcement of VirtualWisdom5 and the VirtualWisdom Network Attached Storage (NAS) Performance Probe – the industry’s first solution for monitoring both SAN and NAS environments. Our NAS Performance Probe offers easy access to real-time wire data and analytics to ensure performance and availability for mission-critical applications workloads across physical, virtual and cloud environments. By collecting, correlating and analyzing data, enterprises can avoid the main causes of performance and availability problems in NAS workloads. These problems include issues such as changing workload and usage patterns, degrading NAS devices, upgrades that go wrong, metadata bottlenecks, rogue clients, noisy neighbours, server/VM latency and more.

Our new line-rate, real-time NAS Performance Probe provides industry-leading NFS monitoring capabilities that enable companies to maximize the utilization of their critical infrastructure assets. It offers simultaneous monitoring of up to 16 ports and is packaged in a 2RU chassis. It provides full duplex monitoring at 10Gb Ethernet line rate with optical connectivity, and supports comprehensive monitoring for all NAS vendor products that support NFSv3.

Today’s announcement is one more proof point of the commitment to product innovation Virtual Instruments reiterated following the recent merger with Load Dynamix. Our users want one version of the “truth” across their hybrid data centers so they can increase the productivity of their infrastructure teams and run their IT organizations more efficiently. The release of VirtualWisdom5 addresses that need, with an easy-to-use, single-pane-of-glass monitoring platform. In addition to its support for the new NAS Performance Probe, VirtualWisdom5 includes enhancements to the user interface and seasonal trend analytics, a new workload analytic to simply integration with Load DynamiX Enterprise for load generation and validation of proposed storage environments, and greater than 10X speedup in SAN fabric discovery, among other improvements.

To stay competitive in a rapidly evolving business environment, IT departments need to be proactive in managing performance and availability. This is challenging in the face of rising infrastructure costs and increasing workloads that stress diverse data centers. For hundreds of large enterprises, the VirtualWisdom platform has been THE standard for performance monitoring in Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure. With our expansion into the NAS-based storage market, Virtual Instruments can bring the benefits and capabilities of VirtualWisdom to even more companies.

If you’re heading to the NetApp Insight conference in Las Vegas next week, stop by and see us in booth #2506 to learn more about VirtualWisdom5 and the NAS Performance Probe